Flinders foraging

Author: pat nourse
Photography: james knowler

4:21PM, Nov 15, 2010

"Welcome home, brother," says Terry Coulthard. Coulthard is a
cultural interpreter, an Adnyamathanha man who works to show
visitors the meaning and value of his people's land in South
Australia's Flinders Ranges. The kin in question right now is René
Redzepi. He's arrived here at this particular rock shelf by these
particular rock paintings after flying to Australia from the other
side of the planet where he runs Noma, a Copenhagen restaurant
recognised by some pundits as the world's best. Redzepi has kept up
a cracking pace since arriving in the country 48 hours earlier to
give an address at the Sydney Opera House, but now the toll of the
jet lag, and quite possibly culture shock, is starting to show. Or
maybe it's the setting, the sun dropping behind hills and a low
breeze in the gums. Either way, this expression of kinship, this
beatific moment, seems to strike Redzepi almost physically.

"For me, you're family, René," says Coulthard, "you're just
coming around full circle to touch base." Coulthard talks about the
rock art, its ochres freighted with ancient but still pertinent
meaning. It's a place of initiation, but also one that contains
directions to sustenance. He talks about how this region is where
the oldest animal fossils in the world have been found, how his
people regard this place as the origin of life. "What goes around
comes around; it's circles of life, and mother earth has something
bigger planned for us all."

For Redzepi, it's an unlikely homecoming in a place he's never
been. Noma, his home base, is something he considers as much a
project about Scandinavian identity as a restaurant. Noma's located
in a former maritime warehouse that is now a centre dedicated to
the promotion and preservation of the art and culture of Denmark,
Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, and Redzepi's cooking is
intimately concerned with time and place. He trained in some of
Europe's most technique-focused restaurants, El Bulli included, but
it's perhaps more what Redzepi chooses to cook than how that has
catapulted restaurant and chef to international recognition in just
seven years.

In working to celebrate Scandinavia, Redzepi scours the region
for its best and most inspiring ingredients, turning from the olive
oil, tomatoes and citrus of the Mediterranean to the butter,
vinegar and wild herbs of the Baltic. In a culinary context where
the local and the seasonal are the new religion, Noma's success
seems like a fait accompli, but believers were in short supply when
Noma opened in 2003. As thin on the ground, perhaps, as champions
of native Australian ingredients are now. Redzepi likes to
reference the whale-penis and blubber jokes that were made about
Noma when the restaurant first opened . "They called us
seal-f***ers," he said at the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards
ceremony in London in 2009. "Look who's laughing now!"

His message is that if he and his fellows could stay true to
their vision and forge a world-beating cuisine from the unlikely
seeming foundation of horseradish, rye bread and cucumber, then
there is no reason it can't be done anywhere else.

It's difficult to think of somewhere less Scandinavian than this
particular patch of the South Australian outback, about nine hours'
drive north of Adelaide. Record rains mean it's relatively green
right now, and hardy little flowers dot the gullies, but still
"fertile" isn't the first adjective you find yourself reaching for.
We're here to talk about food, and the idea of this landscape
fostering a rich cuisine seems absurd. Or at least it does until
you start to walk around with the Coulthard family. Then every turn
reveals something new: quandong fruit, tart around a large nubbly
seed; a leaf of rocket-like pepperiness; and other leaves that,
when crushed, reveal scents of lemongrass, of curry, and of things
that are harder to attach a familiar name to. If you were looking
for a connection between this place and the land of the fjords, it
might be in the life-and-death understanding people have forged
with nature in deeply unforgiving landscapes, whether they're of
schist and ice or sun and scrub.

Back at the Iga Warta camp, the Coulthards and their friends
have been busy. A kangaroo is pulled whole from the coals, swathed
in eucalyptus branches. There's a succulence and a textural
complexity to the meat that's reminiscent of a well-spitted lamb.
The spread includes wattle-seed biscuits, quandong dip, kangaroo
rissoles and a relish made with the piquant bush banana. Andrew
Fielke, a bush food expert, has brought some yabbies in a bucket,
and they're cooked quickly and simply over smouldering embers.
Redzepi tastes them under the close scrutiny of the deeply amused
Adnyamathanha kids.

Talking later over a "feral feast" of emu, smoked kangaroo and
camel sausage at the Prairie Hotel in Parachilna (population
seven), Redzepi says he doesn't understand why truly Australian
ingredients aren't a bigger part of Australian cuisine. "The talk I
gave at the Opera House was about the restaurant," he says. "How we
did it, what we thought was difficult. And then we talked about
Australia and its native ingredients." He'd asked around for a
selection of the plants he'd found while foraging with Ben Shewry,
chef at Melbourne's Attica, when he was last in Australia in 2009.
"I'd spent two days in Sydney before asking for these things and
everybody said 'can't, it's not there, it's too difficult, we don't
have it'. But they were all things I'd seen in Australia before,
with Ben, and I wanted people to taste them - sea succulents,
sorrel leaves, different plants and seaweeds." Shewry came through
with the goods again, bringing an impressive haul. "He came up with
a variety of foraged plants, which I thought was exceptional,"
Redzepi says. "He had 29 varieties with him. Twenty-nine."

"There was a plant Terry Coulthard showed me this afternoon - a
bit like pig's face - that I would use if I was a chef in
Australia," he says. "I'd have it in a meaty broth, this sort of
sea succulent, and that would be enough for a dish for me."

As chance would have it, one of the most recent converts to the
Australian-native-ingredient push is also here. Damien Styles is
the chef at Melbourne's Charcoal Lane; the restaurant's charter is
to provide opportunities and education for Aborigines and
disadvantaged young people interested in the hospitality business.
Native ingredients are a defining element of Styles' menus at
Charcoal Lane, he says, but he has to work hard to overcome the
prejudices of some diners who have been scarred by the previous
generation of chefs' experiments with lemon myrtle coulis and emu
prosciutto. Such is the resistance to incorporating bush food into
our best restaurants' menus; nobody is being called a seal-f***er,
but the witchetty grub and Crocodile Dundee jokes persist.
Somewhere along the line, it seems, top chefs and diners decided
that native Australian ingredients had become a déclassé remnant of
the '80s and '90s, something as shunned by three-star restaurants
as sun-dried tomatoes and sweet potato mash. And yet there are
notable exceptions - finger limes are a hot property, for instance,
while the likes of marron, Murray cod and angasi oysters are in
demand precisely, perhaps, because they're not marketed on the
strength of being native.

Noma is the restaurant Australia's young chefs are scrambling to
work at, and as a result, our own chefs are more interested than
ever before in wood sorrel and malt, wild herbs and foraging. What
will be telling will be how many of them see past Redzepi's
shopping list to his real message. The notion of more of our
nectars and gums, the truffles of our deserts, the wild oranges and
grains and herbs of our plains returning to our menus in force is
on the table now, and its adoption by the big guns will likely be a
matter of when and not if. Talking to Redzepi back at a gorge in
the Flinders, Terry Coulthard says it: "We need to look to the old
ways to prepare for the future."